Rui Barbosa Visiting Chair in Brazilian Studies

The Rui Barbosa Visiting Chair in Brazilian Studies this year celebrates its 20th anniversary. Over the years the Chair has facilitated the presence in Leiden of a number of leading Brazilian scholars across a range of fields with the focus very much on Brazil’s society, economy, politics and international relations. Holders of the Chair participate actively in academic events while in Leiden, including seminars, conferences and special workshops. They also usually deliver a set piece lecture at the end of their stay. Perhaps the most central contribution surrounds the delivery of dedicated courses at postgraduate level. This year, the holders of the Chair, Profs. Luiz Marques and Ester Limonad, will convene a special MA course on Brazil’s environmental challenges. This continues the tradition of policy-relevant courses delivered by previous holders of the Chair.

The first one will focus on climate change, its protocols (Kyoto, Rio and Paris), exploring the most probable scenarios of how its impacts will affect Brazil and the world throughout this century. The second one will approach how nature and life itself become an economic and political issue.

Understanding climate change as the direst threat facing the world and mankind, due to increasing human interference on Earth’s metabolism, the course first unit intends to provide a description of the ongoing effects of climate change throughout Brazil, stressing two main issues: (1) how the rising temperatures projected in the short and long term (2050 – 2100) could threaten Brazilian primary vegetation cover, soil fertility, precipitation, freshwater availability, agriculture, food security and its coastal line, where more than 50 million people live; (2) how climate change in Brazil could reverberate at a global level, given that the Brazilian forests weighs heavily on global climate stability and that Brazil is a major exporter of agricultural commodities, to Europe and China.
Departing from a critical political ecological perspective, the second unit will centre on the changing rapport society-nature, nowadays characterized by a increasing capitalist looting that leaves behind nothing, but dead land. This unit is structured on thematic approaches concerning the management of natural resources (water, forests, ore mining, garbage disposal, hydroelectric power plants, industrial agriculture x land use and regulation) and how it affects biodiversity and native original populations in Brazil and in other global south countries.